I’ve been saying this for a while. They saw the Arab Spring and other populist movements. With their vast oil wealth, tanking Twitter was a small price to pay to re-fracture descent and silence the left. The concentration of wealth has given insane power to wealthy who skew overwhelmingly on the side of themselves. The rise of the right is a direct result of billionaires funding across numerous avenues. They played the long game because they only have to pay people and let them do it for them. Regular folks have to stay engaged in the battle after working to support themselves. Billionaires are the matastasized cancer of capitalism.
Comment on So much for free speech on X; Musk confirms new users must soon pay to post
nikita@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
This seems like further confirmation of that theory that I saw posted on here that the Saudi oil barons funded Elon’s purchase of Twitter for the sole purpose of destroying it. They want to silence online discussions of climate change and other left wing topics.
Combined with Reddit being owned by Tencent, Facebook being eternally evil, and TikTok being unconducive to any form of coherent dialogue, there are not many places for left wing discourse on the internet anymore.
WhatsThePoint@lemmy.world 8 months ago
TWeaK@lemm.ee 8 months ago
The purchase itself was a leveraged buyout, they didn’t pay the entire $44bn as Twitter took out a loan to cover $13bn. Like all leveraged buyouts (eg Toys R Us) the purchase itself is meant to kill the business. Even before Musk started screwing the revenue there was little hope Twitter could pay the interest, let along the principle. Now, Twitter is worth less than the debt, by some estimates.
baru@lemmy.world 8 months ago
This seems like further confirmation of that theory that I saw posted on here that the Saudi oil barons funded Elon’s purchase of Twitter for the sole purpose of destroying it.
Then why did Twitter needed to sue him to get him to abide by the deal? Musk often promotes stuff in a pump and dump scheme. One of the many examples is when he briefly promoted bitcoin. He made loads of money off that.
I’m guessing he thought he could make a lot of money quickly in some way. But then interest rates rose quickly and whatever he was planning fell through.
nikita@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
It’s possible it was a initially pump and dump that turned into a Saudi funded venture. He’s a useful idiot from the Arabs’ perspective.
Diabolo96@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
Twitter is really big there. It’s basically the most used social media by a vast majority compared to other ones. It’s way more plausible that some ‘too much rich to know what to do with all the money’ Saudis princes decided something like a few percent of their wealth to own the biggest social media on their country for bragging right and admin privilege to be worth it. Plus, they probably thought Twitter was too big to fail and die, they just didn’t expect Elon would fuck it up so bad. I don’t think anybody expected Elon to fuck it up so bad.
nikita@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Yeah that’s possible too. It’s all speculation until the Netflix documentary comes out years later lol
PiratePanPan@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
Holy shit you might be right
Larry@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Conservatives are desperately trying to force TikTok to sell because even though its format is garbage, it’s gathered a large leftwing userbase
Syntha@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
This seems like further confirmation of that theory that I saw posted on here that the Saudi oil barons funded Elon’s purchase of Twitter for the sole purpose of destroying it.
Then why does it still exist? Musk took Twitter private, they could’ve just pulled the plug if they wanted to.
NeptuneOrbit@lemmy.world 8 months ago
That terse action would have made mastodon flourish. It had to be gradual.
moup@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Why would they spend billions for this when they could (and still can) just block the website? It’s not like you can sue the King in Saudi Arabia (lest you think you have too many heads)
NJSpradlin@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Blocking the website locally doesn’t halt the movement globally. What was Twitter doing before it was bought? Unionizing people around the globe against police brutality, against voter suppression, against protesting raised retirement ages, against protesting hijab requirements and for women’s equality, and more. Now these protests, which were supported globally, have been heavily impacted by the loss of Twitter. Now what we discuss is almost entirely controlled by the media, instead of ourselves communicating across barriers.
Here? Yeah, sure we can still say that we’re getting some discourse and sharing our lived experiences. But, that’s not at all the same as when Reddit was in full swing, or Twitter.
The rich bought out the internet to divide and control the lower class. We were getting too uppity, and they didn’t like that.
Kalysta@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Reddit’s owned by tencent now? When did this happen?
nikita@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
My bad, Reddit is still owned by an American company but Tencent has a large stake in it since 2019, at least enough to influence the platform into complying with pro-CCP censorship and etc
exscape@kbin.social 8 months ago
"climate change and other left wing topics"... I know that's basically how it works in some countries, but it's insane to consider certain scientific facts left wing, and we really shouldn't support such statements.
nikita@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Thanks for pointing that out. It’s just so normal to think that way here that they’ve even corrupted me into framing climate change that way. It’s not a left wing topic; it’s a reality.
I just hope young people who are thinking of voting conservative here keep in mind that those assholes literally don’t believe in climate change and by extension science and facts. That alone should automatically disqualify conservatives from anyone’s consideration.
reev@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
It’s not a lack of belief, it’s just an abundance of “fuck you, I got mine”.
Justas@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Yes, in Europe, most political parties, both left and right, have their own climate change mitigation policies, because if they don’t, they risk just not being elected.
Tja@programming.dev 8 months ago
Also no mainstream political party in Europe dares to touch Universal Healthcare.
Amaltheamannen@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
Well, they have privatised it and made it worse and worse, with longer queues and worse quality of care.
stellargmite@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Politicising climate change was yet another distraction from dealing with it in a cohesive and unified manner. Divide and conquer.
Hackerman_uwu@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Found the round-earther.
WhatsThePoint@lemmy.world 8 months ago
The reason it’s overwhelmingly called “climate change” instead of global warming now is because of language change pushed by billionaire foundations. The Koch network specifically focus grouped and created the term change. Whether we want it considered left wing or not, the billionaire backed right has made such statements left wing.
loobkoob@kbin.social 8 months ago
I do think "global warming" struggles to convince some more simple people anyway, unfortunately. Because while the average temperature of the globe is increasing and causing the changes in climate that we're seeing, I've come across far too many comments from people saying things like "global warming must be a myth because it snows more than it used to" and things themselves smarter than all climate scientists combined for that observation.
Of course, those same people probably think global warming is good because they like their summer holidays so perhaps their opinions shouldn't matter much either way!
TWeaK@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Climate change was adopted because global warming doesn’t intuitively line up with winters being much colder on top of the average temperature being higher.
fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
Is this really true?
Idiots would walk around on cold days saying “see - this global warming stuff is bullshit”.
Climate change describes the danger much more aptly.
WhatsThePoint@lemmy.world 8 months ago
You should read “Dark Money” by Jane Mayer. Goes into it and a lot of other very eye opening stuff about how the billionaire foundations changed this country.
www.goodreads.com/book/show/27833494-dark-money
PiratePanPan@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
In 2024, anything that makes sense is un-conservative.
WhatsHerBucket@lemmy.world 8 months ago
And yet, here we are :/
TWeaK@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Reality has a left-wing bias.